Imagination and Belief

Abstract In his forthcoming Lectures on Imagination, Paul Ricoeur develops his theory by contending that the imagination may be understood across two axes. The first, horizontal axis moves from reproductive imagination at the left end to productive imagination on the right. A second, vertical axis moves from belief at the bottom to critical distance at the top. This article examines his vertical axis and seek to comprehend and appraise his distinction between imagination as belief and as critical distance. Elaboration of the vertical axis remains significant both as a matter of exegesis internal to the Lectures and, more substantively, as an opening, perhaps especially in our parlous times, to the availability of a distinction between critical distance and being captured by belief. While the article values the potential positive role of critical distance as providing a location for alternative perspectives on and critique of existing imaginative frameworks, it questions Ricoeur’s claims that the vertical axis permits even at the top an escape from belief or that belief is necessarily negative. In developing this response, the article initially returns to subtleties in Ricoeur’s presentation in the Lectures that his main argument on the vertical axis does not pursue, and it then turns to engage in a contrast between Ricoeur’s argument in the Lectures and his argument in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Part of the claim is that perspectives in both hermeneutics and phenomenology to which Ricoeur otherwise adheres challenge his conclusion that critical distance permits an escape from belief. These perspectives also challenge the kind of phenomenological stance Ricoeur develops and so reveal conflicts between hermeneutics and phenomenology and between various strands of phenomenology. The article develops its analysis in particular by distinguishing between Ricoeur’s emphasis on imagination as as if or as seeing as. The article concludes by showing the interrelation of the argument about the persistence of belief to contemporary theory in behavioral economics. The article’s thesis, then, has substantial implications for the construction of Ricoeur’s vertical axis, for the implications of this axis in relation to Ricoeur’s other work, and for its engagement with and expansion of contemporary social theory.